POTTERMORE is Harry Potter Forever

Intern Grace’s Team Pick: Pottermore

The end is nigh: The eighth Harry Potter movie is being released in less than a month. I bought my ticket to see it, found my wizarding robe and told myself I wouldn’t cry when the final credits roll. I was ready to say goodbye to the boy who lived. Autostraddle loves you, Harry Potter.

But what is this rumpus? It’s not really goodbye, after all!

Author J.K. Rowling made the announcement on YouTube, looking supermegafoxyawesomehot:

“Just as the experience of reading requires that the imaginations of the author and the reader work together to create the story, so Pottermore will be built in part by you, the reader.”

I could listen to her say the word “Pottermore” all day. “Pot-a-moor.”

So basically, the new website will let players live out the story as though they were a part of the books. Guys, I never got my letter from Hogwarts. This is a big deal to me.

Rowling explained that Pottermore will be “an online reading experience unlike any other” and told us to keep calm and “follow the owl,” whatever that means. There will also be eBooks and audio books available on the site.

Anyone who’s interested can submit their email address on the website to be notified when registration will be open, but it keeps telling me that “due to overwhelming demand [they] cannot take [my] email address right now. Please be patient.” If by “be patient” they mean “keep hitting refresh,” then I am being extremely patient.

The first one million people to officially register will be allowed access on July 31 (Harry’s birthday), and everyone else will be admitted on October 1.

Grace Ellis has been writing and making hack-job graphics for Autostraddle since 2011 and is a co-creator and co-writer of the comic book series Lumberjanes. She is mostly an intern in name only. (Mostly.) She lives in Columbus, Ohio because why anything. Also, she wants to write the Black Widow movie and feels like if she just keeps telling people, eventually she will be allowed to do it. She has a Twitter and a Tumblr, both of which are pretty above average.

A few years ago I would have been ALL OVER this. Now I can’t seem to care enough to register, or to figure out where the owl is going. Really cool animation, though. I will probablymaybe check out the site in October.

I always either get sorted into ravenclaw or hufflepuff. Everyone always seems to look down on hufflepuff but I wonder if it’s secretly this really awesome house full of really cool, interesting people. That idea kind of makes me want to be a hufflepuff but if it ended up just being what everyone thought it was and I was sorted there, that would really suck.

Honestly, Hufflepuff reminds me of the queer community in that way. It’s kind of that umbrella house full of others that people don’t really get and so they find it off-putting. But it’s actually full of a lot of super amazing people I’d totally want to associate with.

I usually get sorted either Gryffindor or Hufflepuff, and on my Quidditch team (yes…I’m on a college team) I play with my Gryffindor gear. Most of my teammates are either hufflepuff or slytherin, oddly enough, so I’m in the minority! I’m definitely a big activist on campus, so it works out!

“So, developing these vast pool of questions that are randomly selected for a user – so you wont get the same questions as your friend necessarily – I thought it was quite important that people didn’t get to second guess what meant Gryffindor, for example. But the exciting thing for me is that if you’re not sorted into Gryffindor, if you’re sorted into one of the other three houses you will effectively get an extra quarter chapter because you will go off to your on common room. If you are sorted into Gyrffindor you just follow Harry. But if you’re sorted into Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw or Slytherin, you go to your own common room, you meet your own prefect, who will tell you about famous people who were in your house and what the true nature of your house is.
“In the main narrative you only ever see the other houses through the eyes of the three, my three heroes. What I’m basically saying is that it’s not a terrible thing to be in Slytherin. And in fact I have always seen Gryffindor and Slytherin as the two closest houses. I think that Harry himself could have goneeither way very easily. I don’t think it’s very guessable. Yo must be answering honestly. YOu just get one shot at this, it’s like a Mensa test, there’s no going back, you’ve got to do it properly the first time.”

Since there’s no way in hell I’m ending up in Gryffindor I’m very excited about the stuff I’ll learn about one of the other three houses! (Which better be Ravenclaw, seriously. :P)

Yeah, I think that if I were really into Harry Potter I probably wouldn’t have realized either and gotten caught up in all the excitement. Maybe people are also imagining what it’ll be like, so they don’t really notice the fact that she didn’t reveal much? But I’m sure it’ll be awesome, whatever it is.

Oh dear. Come July/October I see myself losing significant portions of time to this. But its ok. I never got my letter either, but I always assumed it was because they tried to send it via Pigwidgeon and he got distracted/lost along the way.

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